Review of a compelling portrait of a trainwreck of a stand-up

A  macho mythology surrounds the hard-bitten, hard-living road comic, especially in the US, drawing on the romanticised nobility of the travelling troubadour/sage living by his wits, and saying and acting  exactly how he wants, however self-destructive and reprehensible those activities may be.

This is the template for Billy Ray Schafer, the seedily debauched antihero of Running The Light. He’s a one-time hotshot whose career and relationship long ago burnt up in a conflagration fuelled by narcissism and addiction. Now – with nothing else going for him – he’s reduced to playing every dive in every anonymous town in America, and electrifying them all with his mercurial stand-up. 

But for Schafer, each gig is just the first step in another self-destructive night of debasement through booze, coke and maybe meaningless sex – ending in morning-after regret, if he has any feelings at all, that can only be assuaged by repeating the futile cycle someplace new tomorrow.

Sam Tallent’s compelling novel depicts a grim week in the life of this tragic outsider in vivid detail, allowing the reader to experience the post-gig (and post-line) highs and the soul-crushing lows of a nihilistic, nomadic, precarious,  car-crash existence, just a few jokes from being out on the streets.

The account seems authentic, akin to Hunter S Thompson’s gonzo-journalism of America’s underbelly. Tallent is a hard-gigging comic himself; Marc Maron says ‘it all rings true’; and in his introduction, Doug Stanhope – who may well be considered a template for Schafer – calls the book ‘the best true-life representation of the Great America Road Comic that has ever been written.’ And it is not a flattering portrait.

It is, however, a beautifully written one. For Tallent conveys the experience of living gig-to-gig with a rare lyricism and an eye for picking just the right pedestrian detail that sets the scene perfectly. Each sentence has a rhythm and poetry, without ever feeling forced or pretentiously literary. Just one example:  ‘Eventually the only person that remembered the greatness of Billy Ray Schafer was Billy Ray Schafer. He became his own telltale heart, a totem, a relic doomed and entombed, forever buried alive with the corpse of his career.’

Nor it is it a miserable book. However squalid, the highs of Schafer’s nights out are experienced vicariously by the reader, and the writing is often funny. It’s canny that Schafer – who found a purpose in comedy after his wayward youth took him to prison – is still good at his job, so you understand why he keeps returning to the teat of stand-up, even though its milk has long soured. There is a perverse heroism in the uncompromising way Schafer sticks to his journey, even if the destination is bleak, and we empathise with him through every bad decision, even if we don’t approve. 

Questions as to whether he’s just a man out of his time lie beneath the surface – though his bawdy material hits home hard in the no-frills strip-mall bars he plays, where no one talks of toxic masculinity. Among the real-life comedians who make cameos in the fictional narrative, the late Norm Macdonald plays a pivotal role, exemplifying the path Schafer could have followed if only he’d retained some clarity. The bitter-sweet encounter spurs him on to seek the redemption he’s been crying all along – even if he has very little clue how to find it.

Tallent wrote the book during lockdown and self-published it soon afterwards. That it became a word-of-mouth hit in the States, championed by other comedians, is testament to how legitimately he captures the raw reality of this gruelling circuit.

Now it’s been picked up and re-released by White Rabbit, an imprint of the giant Hatchette publishing group, who, hopefully, will help find it the wider audience it deserves. For while Running The Light is required reading for anyone interested in what makes some stand-ups tick – and a tough cautionary tale for any open-miccer – it’s more universally a mesmerising character study of a man driving himself to oblivion: tragic, funny and unputdownable.

• Running The Light by Sam Tallent has been published by White Rabbit.  It is available from Amazon priced £17.97 – or from uk.bookshop.org, below, which supports independent bookstores. 

Published: 12 Jun 2025